Recommendations based on "The Curate's Awakening and The Ladies Confession"

Discover untold secrets with this extraordinary memoir of drama and tragedy by Anne Glenconner—a close member of the royal circle and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret.Anne Glenconner has been at the center of the royal circle from childhood, when she met and befriended the future Queen Elizabeth II and her sister, the Princess Margaret. Though the firstborn child of the 5th Earl of Leicester, who controlled one of the largest estates in England, as a daughter she was deemed "the greatest disappointment" and unable to inherit. Since then she has needed all her resilience to survive court life with her sense of humor intact.A unique witness to landmark moments in royal history, Maid of Honor at Queen Elizabeth's coronation, and a lady in waiting to Princess Margaret until her death in 2002, Anne's life has encompassed extraordinary drama and tragedy. In Lady in Waiting, she will share many intimate royal stories from her time as Princess Margaret's closest confidante as well as her own battle for survival: her broken-off first engagement on the basis of her "mad blood"; her 54-year marriage to the volatile, unfaithful Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, who left his fortune to a former servant; the death in adulthood of two of her sons; a third son she nursed back from a six-month coma following a horrific motorcycle accident. Through it all, Anne has carried on, traveling the world with the royal family, including visiting the White House, and developing the Caribbean island of Mustique as a safe harbor for the rich and famous-hosting Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Raquel Welch, and many other politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities.With unprecedented insight into the royal family, Lady in Waiting is a witty, candid, dramatic, at times heart-breaking personal story capturing life in a golden cage for a woman with no inheritance.New York Times BestsellerUSA Today BestsellerThe Sunday Times BestsellerThe Globe and Mail BestsellerABA Indie BestsellerThe Times (UK) Memoir of the YearOne of Newsweek's Most Anticipated Books of 2020

A powerful story of love and deception set against the true events of one of the most secret and terrifying of Heinrich Himmler's wartime projects - the Lebensborn Nazi breeding programmeCyrla's neighbours have begun to whisper. Her cousin, Annika, is pregnant and has passed the rigorous exams for admission to the Lebensborn, a maternity home for Aryan girls carrying German babies. Annika's soldier has disappeared; the Nazis confiscate fatherless children. Cyrla, sent from Poland to hide with her Dutch relatives, has been warned that her neighbours know she is half Jewish. She won't be safe for long.A cruel twist of fate places Cyrla with the terrible choice between certain discovery in her cousin's home and taking Annika's place in the Lebensborn. If she takes refuge in teh enemy's lair, can Cyrla fool teh doctors, nurses, guards and other mothers-to-be? How will she escape before they discover she is not who she claims?

For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Kate Furnivall comes a gritty tale of courage, betrayal and love in the most unlikely of places. Also published as The German Midwife.

Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) yearned to be formally educated and enjoy an independent life in Venetian literary circles. But instead, at sixteen, her father forced her into a Benedictine convent. To protest her confinement, Tarabotti composed polemical works exposing the many injustices perpetrated against women of her day.Paternal Tyranny, the first of these works, is a fiery but carefully argued manifesto against the oppression of women by the Venetian patriarchy. Denouncing key misogynist texts of the era, Tarabotti shows how despicable it was for Venice, a republic that prided itself on its political liberties, to deprive its women of rights accorded even to foreigners. She accuses parents of treating convents as dumping grounds for disabled, illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted daughters. Finally, through compelling feminist readings of the Bible and other religious works, Tarabotti demonstrates that women are clearly men's equals in God's eyes.An avenging angel who dared to speak out for the rights of women nearly four centuries ago, Arcangela Tarabotti can now finally be heard.

The Legacy...From poverty in Wales to the glory of the boxing ring, from Probhibation in America and the bombing of England begins the family saga of their fortunes and their lives. Trail and Retribution...A child goes missing and is murdered, the mother's lover is the prime suspect. Twelve men and women will decide the verdict. Will they get it right?

Lucia Lucas, the eternally effervescent dowager, continues to consternate and beguile friends and antagonists alike in the English countryside where she becomes embroiled in high finance, buried treasure, politics, and love

In hopes of saving a beloved medieval church from ruin, Marion prays for a miracle; but subsequent entanglement in a world of professional musicians who seem to solve her problems leads to some terrible ramifications which make Marion question whether her prayers were really a "success."

A very enjoyable, nicely illustrated book on one of royalty's most captivating personalities: Mary, Queen of Scots. Her rivalry with Queen Elizabeth I, over Mary's claim to the throne of England, ultimately led to her execution and martyrdom.

Clodia Metelli: The Tribune's Sister is the first full-length biography of a Roman aristocrat whose colorful life, as described by her contemporaries, has inspired numerous modern works of popular fiction, art, and poetry. Clodia, widow of the consul Metellus Celer, was one of several prominent females who made a mark on history during the last decades of the Roman Republic. As the eldest sister of the populist demagogue P. Clodius Pulcher, she used her wealth and position to advance her brother's political goals. For that she was brutally reviled by Clodius' enemy, the orator M. Tullius Cicero, in a speech painting her as a scheming, debauched whore. Clodia may also have been the alluring mistress celebrated in the love poetry of Catullus, whom he calls "Lesbia" in homage to Sappho and depicts as beautiful, witty, but also false and corrupt. From Cicero's letters, finally, we receive glimpses of a very different woman, a great lady at her leisure. This study examines Clodia in the contexts of her family background, the societal expectations for a woman of her rank, and the turbulent political climate in which she operated. It weighs the value of the several kinds of testimony about her and attempts to extract a picture as faithful to historical truth as possible. The manner in which Clodia was represented in writings of the period, and the motives of their authors in portraying her as they did, together shed considerable light on the role played by female figures in Roman fiction and historiography.